A patent lasts no more than seventeen years. In any realistic economic sense, that's no time at all. Frankly, it's such a short time that it doesn't affect anyone except taillight followers and copycats. Having somebody floating around whose only real motivation is ferreting out such scum and getting them to pay for the hard work that they're trying to sponge off of is a good thing.
Note to cell phone operators : stop thinking about milking your customers dry. Start thinking about offering services, such as voip roaming (ie if my cellphone finds a wifi network, use sipphone instead of $lousy_gsm_provider - especially when roaming abroad !)
So you want one of the new HP iPaq6300 series devices, which do just that?
Did you know that the number of words in a document is not a single value, but depends on the use of the document? I'm sure that Stephenson does know that: if you're writing for some audiences, you don't count the words in foot- or endnotes, whereas for others, you do. If you're writing for some audiences, you don't count "short words", whereas for others, you do.
And, of course, if you're writing in Japanese, wc counts your entire document as being one word long.
What does this have to do with Unix? It's a classic example of Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The Unix command wc is a classic exmple.
This whole article is based on the speculation of a web master who notices that a bot which allegedly isn't leaving behind a bot name is crawling his site. He then figures out that, oh look, there is a standard record in his server log.
And I'm supposed to take this clown's "friend" seriously? That's not a good start, anyway.
But then there's the real howler: the site can allegedly only be found through site: on Google. How does the friend know that? Has he done a complete crawl of the web to find all forward links to any image in his site -- even broken ones? MSNBot, like all bots, recognizes that many anchors are broken, and tries plausible corrections around the broken links. That's particularly useful with a deep link, where the deep link may have timed out but the shallow link still exists.
I read that sentence, and was confused. "Taking a sledgehammer to a kitten" -- is that like "taking coals to Newcastle"? Or is it like "taking a shine to the newcomer"?
The parent engages in some wishful thinking, confusing volitional or knowing patent infringement with general infringement. You can unknowingly infringe on a patent, and then the real damages computed by the jury get assigned to you. If you engage in knowing infringement, you get nailed for triple the real damages.
The big daddy of them all: Aspirin -- still a trademark in Germany, but now held to be generic in the United States. And, of course, Xerox, which is rapidly becoming an unenforceable trademark here, too.
Actually, to use those same unlicensed codecs in a non-commercial product is also seriously illegal -- it's just that you're assuming that neither MS nor Apple will go after you for using them. That's probably a sound assumption as long as MPlayer remains restricted to the hobbyist market; it would not be sound if it moved outside that market.
Last summer, a group of developers from a company based here in the Puget Sound area held a funeral for a particular subsystem which was being retired with extreme prejudice. They went to a park in the southern part of Bellevue, and carefully layed out a CD containing the source code for the product on top of a pyre of shrink wrap boxes for clients of this particular piece of server code. They held a proper wake for the late unlamented, and then, with kerosene and some matches, sent it on its way to a different, if not necessarily better, place.
Unfortunately, it was about 35 Celsius that fine July day, and there was a burn ban in place throughout King County. The neighbors did summon the department of fire protection, and did also summon the department of police protection. Hilarity ensued, I am told, while the hapless coders ran around trying to extinguish the blaze and eliminate the evidence before the arrival of those two fine force of Washington State's best.
(No, this story does not refer to employees of Microsoft. I wish it did, as that would make it better still -- but I'm afraid that geeks who live indoors are much the same everywhere.)
It's been associated with a lot of big city machines. The earliest-known example was actually a parody of Francis Curley, who was mayor of Boston, and whose slogan was said to be "Vote for Curley// Often and Early".
Actually, filling the channel takes about six weeks. The boxes will have been readied for the final CDs starting about two weeks ago, and the actual manufacture of the disks will have begun the morning the product went gold. The big delay lies in shipping the product to major distributors who must they reship to individual stores, which must then put up the displays, etc. Each individual step takes no more than a week, but there's not much parallelism in the distribution process.
I don't know if what you are saying is true, but it should not be legal to sell a CD with data on it for $50 and say later, if you don't agree to X, Y, and Z, then you just paid $50 for a CD, and you can't use the data.
Sorry, but the distinction between an object and its content is what copyright is all about. If I buy a script and score for a musical, I can't perform the musical in public without permission of the copyright holder. I can't do as I like with the content of a book without permission of a copyright holder. That's exactly what copyright is designed to enforce.
Unfortunately, you're making the same error many people make. You are free to keep the CD -- I hear that they make fine drink coasters, and the Martha Stewart is planning a segment on creative uses of them in her "How to cover your tracks when you really need to" special -- which should start filming in, oh, about...five months. That doesn't mean you're free to use the software that's stored on it; that requires you to accept the terms of a contract. That's been the justification for click-through EULAs world-wide, and it's why the EFF lost this round, and will lose follow-ups, too.
I call bullshit. In 1999, my son was taking an enrichment course in our local school system. The particular unit was on finance -- so Iassigned this then ten-year-old boy to read _The madness of crowds_. He read it and said "Dad, is the current stock market another tulip craze?" Now, granted, he's a really smart kid -- but I suggest that if any ten-year-old can read a book about tulips and the south sea company and recognize that the internet bubble was more of the same, then lots and lots of grownups could, too.
Actually, a VT100 would probably not serve as well. The PC could be used to connect securely over a TCP/IP connection, obviating the need to configure a modem farm and maintain a bunch of incoming dialup lines -- or, worse, pay for a bunch of dedicated wires. More than that, the PC probably cost less to buy than any dumb terminal on the market -- businesses know the trick of buying way behind the curve for all but the most demanding employees.
If you read the actual article, you'll see that what it says is that the new features provided in SP2 for IE (the popup blocker and the notification bar at the top) are not going to be back-ported to older operating systems. That's not the same as saying that "Microsoft To Provide IE Patches for Windows XP Only". In the article, Microsoft commits to continue patching IE for older versions, particularly for security bugs.
(And don't tell me that the submittor picks the title. The editors pick the title -- in this case, the title doesn't even match the submission, much less the article.)
They had three levels of redundancy: a mandatory monthly reboot to protect the application, a mandatory 49 day reboot if the application hadn't been restarted at the monthly reboot, and a backup system. All of them failed.
Two of them were technician errors: the procedure was documented, along with the known flaw in the radio application software that caused it to be required. I'd say that, yes, this was technician error.
The article you cite is pure FUD. The GPL is a contract. Moglin is deliberately confusing the term "license" with the term "grant". A contract is any agreement, typically written, in which two parties agree to take certain actions in a reciprocal exchange of value or commitment to act. A grant is an agreement between any two parties in which one gives the other value or service, in an express hope of a return. (A gift is yet something again.)
If you go look at the GPL itself, you'll see a bunch of clauses of the form "you may do...provided...". You won't see clauses of the form "You may do...unconditionally". (For comparison, the three-clause BSD license is a grant -- you are literally allowed to do anything you like with the code. The four-clause BSD is a contract, since you must preserve the attribution of the original code in all derived works.)
More clearly, you cannot "violate" or "fail to comply" with the terms of a grant. You can only "violate" or "fail to comply with" the terms of a contract. Since Eban Moglin seeks to see the terms of the GPL "enforced", as he himself publicly states, in his view, it is a contract, subject to court ordered enforcement.
No. The license is a contract. There's no reason for a "recall clause" -- bankruptcy trumps any contract, not just contracts to repay debts. That's why, for instance, airlines can routinely either renegotiate contracts or stop flying when they enter bankruptcy -- technically, the company's relationship with any supplier or consumer is severed by the court.
Slashdot Mirror
A patent lasts no more than seventeen years. In any realistic economic sense, that's no time at all. Frankly, it's such a short time that it doesn't affect anyone except taillight followers and copycats. Having somebody floating around whose only real motivation is ferreting out such scum and getting them to pay for the hard work that they're trying to sponge off of is a good thing.
Good point, but not relevant to this article. It only measures sell-through, not past market share.
What about footnotes? Does the TOC count in the word count, or not? Does an APA citation count as a single word, or as two or more?
Paradoxically, word counting is a particularly hard problem from dvi, precisely because it's a display-oriented format, not a content-oriented format.
Did you know that the number of words in a document is not a single value, but depends on the use of the document? I'm sure that Stephenson does know that: if you're writing for some audiences, you don't count the words in foot- or endnotes, whereas for others, you do. If you're writing for some audiences, you don't count "short words", whereas for others, you do.
And, of course, if you're writing in Japanese, wc counts your entire document as being one word long.
What does this have to do with Unix? It's a classic example of Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The Unix command wc is a classic exmple.
This whole article is based on the speculation of a web master who notices that a bot which allegedly isn't leaving behind a bot name is crawling his site. He then figures out that, oh look, there is a standard record in his server log.
And I'm supposed to take this clown's "friend" seriously? That's not a good start, anyway.
But then there's the real howler: the site can allegedly only be found through site: on Google. How does the friend know that? Has he done a complete crawl of the web to find all forward links to any image in his site -- even broken ones? MSNBot, like all bots, recognizes that many anchors are broken, and tries plausible corrections around the broken links. That's particularly useful with a deep link, where the deep link may have timed out but the shallow link still exists.
Joke. Head. Funny joke? *WHOOSH*
I read that sentence, and was confused. "Taking a sledgehammer to a kitten" -- is that like "taking coals to Newcastle"? Or is it like "taking a shine to the newcomer"?
Please, more context would be nice...
The parent engages in some wishful thinking, confusing volitional or knowing patent infringement with general infringement. You can unknowingly infringe on a patent, and then the real damages computed by the jury get assigned to you. If you engage in knowing infringement, you get nailed for triple the real damages.
The big daddy of them all: Aspirin -- still a trademark in Germany, but now held to be generic in the United States. And, of course, Xerox, which is rapidly becoming an unenforceable trademark here, too.
No, it's double-plus undead.
Actually, to use those same unlicensed codecs in a non-commercial product is also seriously illegal -- it's just that you're assuming that neither MS nor Apple will go after you for using them. That's probably a sound assumption as long as MPlayer remains restricted to the hobbyist market; it would not be sound if it moved outside that market.
Last summer, a group of developers from a company based here in the Puget Sound area held a funeral for a particular subsystem which was being retired with extreme prejudice. They went to a park in the southern part of Bellevue, and carefully layed out a CD containing the source code for the product on top of a pyre of shrink wrap boxes for clients of this particular piece of server code. They held a proper wake for the late unlamented, and then, with kerosene and some matches, sent it on its way to a different, if not necessarily better, place.
Unfortunately, it was about 35 Celsius that fine July day, and there was a burn ban in place throughout King County. The neighbors did summon the department of fire protection, and did also summon the department of police protection. Hilarity ensued, I am told, while the hapless coders ran around trying to extinguish the blaze and eliminate the evidence before the arrival of those two fine force of Washington State's best.
(No, this story does not refer to employees of Microsoft. I wish it did, as that would make it better still -- but I'm afraid that geeks who live indoors are much the same everywhere.)
Actually, the press release did mention the Amulet project -- it's also ARM-supported.
It's been associated with a lot of big city machines. The earliest-known example was actually a parody of Francis Curley, who was mayor of Boston, and whose slogan was said to be "Vote for Curley // Often and Early".
Then again, maybe the GP poster is the one confused.
Actually, filling the channel takes about six weeks. The boxes will have been readied for the final CDs starting about two weeks ago, and the actual manufacture of the disks will have begun the morning the product went gold. The big delay lies in shipping the product to major distributors who must they reship to individual stores, which must then put up the displays, etc. Each individual step takes no more than a week, but there's not much parallelism in the distribution process.
Unfortunately, you're making the same error many people make. You are free to keep the CD -- I hear that they make fine drink coasters, and the Martha Stewart is planning a segment on creative uses of them in her "How to cover your tracks when you really need to" special -- which should start filming in, oh, about...five months. That doesn't mean you're free to use the software that's stored on it; that requires you to accept the terms of a contract. That's been the justification for click-through EULAs world-wide, and it's why the EFF lost this round, and will lose follow-ups, too.
I call bullshit. In 1999, my son was taking an enrichment course in our local school system. The particular unit was on finance -- so Iassigned this then ten-year-old boy to read _The madness of crowds_. He read it and said "Dad, is the current stock market another tulip craze?" Now, granted, he's a really smart kid -- but I suggest that if any ten-year-old can read a book about tulips and the south sea company and recognize that the internet bubble was more of the same, then lots and lots of grownups could, too.
Actually, a VT100 would probably not serve as well. The PC could be used to connect securely over a TCP/IP connection, obviating the need to configure a modem farm and maintain a bunch of incoming dialup lines -- or, worse, pay for a bunch of dedicated wires. More than that, the PC probably cost less to buy than any dumb terminal on the market -- businesses know the trick of buying way behind the curve for all but the most demanding employees.
If you read the actual article, you'll see that what it says is that the new features provided in SP2 for IE (the popup blocker and the notification bar at the top) are not going to be back-ported to older operating systems. That's not the same as saying that "Microsoft To Provide IE Patches for Windows XP Only". In the article, Microsoft commits to continue patching IE for older versions, particularly for security bugs.
(And don't tell me that the submittor picks the title. The editors pick the title -- in this case, the title doesn't even match the submission, much less the article.)
They had three levels of redundancy: a mandatory monthly reboot to protect the application, a mandatory 49 day reboot if the application hadn't been restarted at the monthly reboot, and a backup system. All of them failed.
Two of them were technician errors: the procedure was documented, along with the known flaw in the radio application software that caused it to be required. I'd say that, yes, this was technician error.
The article you cite is pure FUD. The GPL is a contract. Moglin is deliberately confusing the term "license" with the term "grant". A contract is any agreement, typically written, in which two parties agree to take certain actions in a reciprocal exchange of value or commitment to act. A grant is an agreement between any two parties in which one gives the other value or service, in an express hope of a return. (A gift is yet something again.)
If you go look at the GPL itself, you'll see a bunch of clauses of the form "you may do...provided...". You won't see clauses of the form "You may do...unconditionally". (For comparison, the three-clause BSD license is a grant -- you are literally allowed to do anything you like with the code. The four-clause BSD is a contract, since you must preserve the attribution of the original code in all derived works.)
More clearly, you cannot "violate" or "fail to comply" with the terms of a grant. You can only "violate" or "fail to comply with" the terms of a contract. Since Eban Moglin seeks to see the terms of the GPL "enforced", as he himself publicly states, in his view, it is a contract, subject to court ordered enforcement.
No. The license is a contract. There's no reason for a "recall clause" -- bankruptcy trumps any contract, not just contracts to repay debts. That's why, for instance, airlines can routinely either renegotiate contracts or stop flying when they enter bankruptcy -- technically, the company's relationship with any supplier or consumer is severed by the court.